From a distance the forest in which we're spending April isn't much to look at, just one of the countless furry bumpy Appalachian hills. In this season you can still sometimes see other hills in the distance, too,
but forests are, I'm remembering, about nearness, not distance. They're immersive and inward looking. In fact they can seem all eyes, a panopticon of everything silently alert to everything else. This is unnerving, as the "dark forest 黑暗森林" hypothesis in Liu Cixin's Three Body Problem registers. Some have argued that civilization itself is premised on a rejection - and terror - of the forest.
And yet it's possible to feel comfort and joy in a forest: held, not just - or because? - beheld. Some of that is Romanticism:
The clearest way into the Universe
is through a forest wilderness
John Muir wrote in his journal. How much of that feeling of sublimity arises because the forest has proved vanquishable if not vanquished, "wilderness" a vulnerable rarity. Quite different from what it must have been like to be surrounded by endless horizonless woods - or to know how to be at home in them, along with all the other-than-human peoples who make them up...
